Earliest networking? Not telco lines, but hardwired stuff. I recall that in 1974/75 I was making one of my trips to Control Data Arden Hills and noticed a backhoe at work digging a trench around the employee's parking lot in back of the main building.
I asked what was going on and was told that Jim Thornton was experimenting with high-speed distance networking by laying a couple of loops of coax around the parking lot. Rumor was that he was aiming for the then-unthinkable speed of 50 Mbit/second. I don't recall the outcome. --Chuck
